quinta-feira, fevereiro 02, 2006

La religione oppio dei popoli: the Muslim cartoons controversy

This is just to re-affirm our freedom of speech.. and even our RIGHT to dis-respect religion and religious beliefs. To denounce the dementia of all the fanatics polluting this world. To express solidarity for the danish and french journalists. To remember Theo Van Gogh.

2 Comments:

I agree that religion was, for many centuries, the opium of masses; Nowadays, however, football, consumerism and television are doing much better in capturing the working class’s propensity for addiction…

The row over the infamous cartoons clearly shows that many Islamist clerics and believers didn’t reach our enlightened age of tolerance, science and knowledge; so didn’t the pope who months’ ago banned Cecilia Bartolli’s Opera Proibita.

However, this also begs a question: those who challenged Muslim fanaticism by publishing the cartoons were sure of being backed by a large sector of our public opinion; would our reaction be the same if, instead of ridiculing Islam, the cartoons were ridiculing, for example, social minorities? I guess that, instead of heroes, journalists would easily be branded racist, sexist and medieval. Why isn’t then ethnocentric and medieval to ridicule Islam?

the only medieval thing here is the raction of the fanatics. They would be very comfortable in inquisition time, judging by their arguments.

I think the sense of the story was very well explained by a Danish journalists tonight at Newsnight. It is always a matter of the limits/standards that a society sets to itself, and ususally these limits in the western world are defined by laws and human rights. No law forbids mockery to religion, and neither this is against human rights, invoked -strangely- by the fanatics. Here in Europe we can make fun of religion. However, and this is what the fanatics cannot understand, we find difficult to accept Holocaust denial and jokes on concentration camp (this is important here, because their argument is that we cannot make fun of Jew religion, untrue). But this is part of our recent history. Another distinction: I do not need to deny Holocaust to criticize Israel politics..reading the comments from Muslim on the BBC website is really enlightening ..But the really interesting question is another one: why now?